About Me

I received my MA in philosophy of science many years ago and currently reviving my academic interests. I hope to stimulate individuals in the realms of science, philosophy and the arts...to provide as much free information as possible.

Friday, March 19, 2010

"E-book" poll

Are you in favor of E-books?

No...0

Yes...5

Sometimes...2

Well, I have to go with the "sometimes". There are distinct advantages for both. Used book stores are becoming scarce and thrift stores are looking at used books as if they were gold and charging more than what a thrift store policy should be. And, if one enlists the services of used book companies on line, the prices become almost prohibitive especially when shipping is added. The book[s] must be a "must have". New books...the prices are just too high. Thankfully, there are a number of online websites that offer free E-books. [See list below]. And many times free E-books are buried in 100s of websites. One just has to do a lot of research...and get lucky. And some publishers of college text books are experimenting with E-books though a recent study has indicated that students aren't that pleased. But E-books have some serious limitations both as a physical commodity and the aesthetic quality. It is so comforting holding a book...one of those aesthetic experiences that cannot be gleaned from E-books...the weight, the texture of the pages, the aroma. And, I am one of those individuals [that will be punished in Hell] for underlining and making marginal notations. Non-E-books are portable. It would be difficult to lug a lap top for access to some tome to pass the time while the Pinto is being repaired or just enjoying the ambiance of nature and reading some poetry. And lastly, a lot of important texts are simply not available in electronic format. Besides, it is nice to have a library that can be seen.

Justin Russell replied with some additional sources [Europeana, PDF Search Engine, Perseus Digital Library, Scribd, The Internet Sacred Text Library, The Warburg Institute Library, World Digital Library] that I have added to the above list. The Internet Sacred Text Library is quite good and constantly being updated but I did not list one item. The 2020ok Directory~ is a nightmare in navigation and errant in listed texts. Nevertheless, the additions are welcome.And Justin also provided a new/used book search engine called BookButler.

"High-Speed Camera Scans Books in Seconds"

by

Charlie Sorrel

March 18th, 2010

Wired

Professor Ishikawa Komuro’s Tokyo lab is better known for robot hands that can dribble and catch balls and spin pencils between their fingers. Now, two researchers have taken this speedy sensing tech and applied it to the ripping of paper books.

Books are different from other kinds of media, like music and movies — it’s very hard to get them into a computer. There is no equivalent of CD or DVD rippers like iTunes or Handbrake. This not only makes piracy laborious, it also stops you from turning your own books into e-books.

This high-speed scanner changes that, at least if you have the room and tech skills to build one. By using a high-speed camera that shoots at 500 frames per second, lab workers Takashi Nakashima and Yoshihiro Watanabe can scan a 200-page book in under a minute. You just hold the book under the camera and flip through the pages as if shuffling a deck of cards. The camera records the images and uses processing power to turn the odd-shaped pictures into flat, rectangular pages on which regular OCR (optical character recognition) can be performed.

The technique is unlikely to be coming to the home anytime soon (although ripping a book by flipping it in front of your notebook’s webcam would be pretty awesome), but it could certainly speed up large scanning efforts like Google’s book project.

Poet colleague

Annus mirabilis-1905 March is a time of transition winter and spring commence their struggle between moments of ice and mud a robin appears heralding the inevitable life stumbling from its slumber it was in such a period of change in 1905 that the House of Physics would see its Newtonian axioms of an ordered universe collapse into a new frontier where the divisions of time and space matter and energy were to blend as rain and wind in a storm that broke loose within the mind of Albert Einstein where Brownian motion danced seen and unseen, a random walk that became his papers marching through science reshaping the very fabric of the universe we have come to know we all share a common ancestor a star long lost in the eons of memory and yet in that commonality nature demands a permutation a perchance genetic roll of the dice which births a new vision lifting us temporarily from the mystery exposing some of the roots to our existence only to raise a plethora of more questions as did the papers of Einstein in 1905